Illegal Organ Market: Who are the Players?

The next question you might ask is what or who makes up the illegal organ market? Who are the players? In the next series of posts, I will try to break down who makes up this market.

The Recipient

First, and foremost, the market is driven by the recipient. The recipient is the patient in desperate need of an organ transplant. The patient is put on a donor list. As you saw from the previous post, organ availability is low. As low as the availability of kidneys, which can be donated from a living donor, the availability of lungs, livers and hearts are significantly lower.

In the most likely scenario, the patient typically will die before receiving an organ, and/or spend a significant part of their remaining days with a poor quality of life. As an example, a patient in renal, or kidney, failure will spend most of their life receiving kidney dialysis three times a week, every week, until they receive a kidney transplant or die!

Facing this scenario, the patient begins to experience hopelessness, and begins to explore the black market looking for an organ, after losing faith in the ability of their physicians and healthcare system to find an organ in an expeditious time frame.

Next post...the Donor